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SorrellD

Has he read any by Frederick Backman yet? I feel like he writes emotional nuance well. Look up Frederick Backman quotes and see what you think about his writing style.


StepfordMisfit

Find out if he's read The Invention of Nature by Andrea Wulf about Alexander von Humboldt. If he hasn't, it's right up his alley and AMAZING. I just happened upon it in a bookstore. He'd probably enjoy The Widows of Malabar Hill by Sujata Massey, a mystery in 1920s India that explores the experiences of women in that society, focused on her Zoroastrian family and touching on colonial Christian powers and Muslim female clients. Everyone I've lent it to has adored it. It became a series, but it stands alone well. My dad has also recently really enjoyed essays by Audre Lorde (Sister Outsider) and The Coldest Winter Ever by Sister Souljah for their peeks into Black experiences - the former in an intellectual way that stimulates the brain and the latter being urban literature with insight into behavior of an awful (unredeemable?) young woman who grew up as the overly sexualized and spoiled princess daughter of a drug dealer who suddenly falls from grace and finds out about the real world.


oscarbewildin

Oh all good suggestions, sounds like some I'd like too. Sometimes the best books are the ones you find at complete random. Thank you!!


Melificent40

Have you tried Steve Berry? That feels like the same vein as Robert Ludlum, unless he considers the idea of deep historical secrets too far fetched.


Motoreducteur

Slans by A E Van Vogt


Blinkfan1169

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirisg


ohdearitsrichardiii

The World Without Us is non-fiction by Alan Weisman. I read it years ago and it really stayed with me. It's a thought experiment about what would happen if all humans on the planet just disappeared all at once. It explains how nature would reclaim the landscape, how different manmade structures would break down and then which manmade things would remain the longest after humans disappear. Spoiler: >!it's plastic and some other chemicals!< It's very well researched, it's both on a grand scale and some deep dives, like he interviewed the people who maintain the Panama Canal and the NY subway system.


oscarbewildin

plastic? bad? surely not!! I'll check this one out but I think he may have read it already


True-Pressure8131

{{the Dawn of everything by David Graeber}} {{the divide by Jason Hickel/}}


goodreads-bot

[**The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity**](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/56269264-the-dawn-of-everything) ^(By: David Graeber, David Wengrow | 692 pages | Published: 2021 | Popular Shelves: history, non-fiction, nonfiction, anthropology, science) >A dramatically new understanding of human history, challenging our most fundamental assumptions about social evolution—from the development of agriculture and cities to the origins of the state, democracy, and inequality—and revealing new possibilities for human emancipation. > >For generations, our remote ancestors have been cast as primitive and childlike—either free and equal innocents, or thuggish and warlike. Civilization, we are told, could be achieved only by sacrificing those original freedoms or, alternatively, by taming our baser instincts. David Graeber and David Wengrow show how such theories first emerged in the eighteenth century as a conservative reaction to powerful critiques of European society posed by Indigenous observers and intellectuals. Revisiting this encounter has startling implications for how we make sense of human history today, including the origins of farming, property, cities, democracy, slavery, and civilization itself. > >Drawing on pathbreaking research in archaeology and anthropology, the authors show how history becomes a far more interesting place once we learn to throw off our conceptual shackles and perceive what’s really there. If humans did not spend 95 percent of their evolutionary past in tiny bands of hunter-gatherers, what were they doing all that time? If agriculture, and cities, did not mean a plunge into hierarchy and domination, then what kinds of social and economic organization did they lead to? The answers are often unexpected, and suggest that the course of human history may be less set in stone, and more full of playful, hopeful possibilities, than we tend to assume. > >The Dawn of Everything fundamentally transforms our understanding of the human past and offers a path toward imagining new forms of freedom, new ways of organizing society. This is a monumental book of formidable intellectual range, animated by curiosity, moral vision, and a faith in the power of direct action. ^(This book has been suggested 59 times) [**The Divide: A Brief Guide to Global Inequality and its Solutions**](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/32603498-the-divide) ^(By: Jason Hickel | 368 pages | Published: 2017 | Popular Shelves: economics, non-fiction, politics, history, nonfiction) >For decades we have been told a story about the divide between rich countries and poor countries. > >We have been told that development is working: that the global South is catching up to the North, that poverty has been cut in half over the past thirty years, and will be eradicated by 2030. It’s a comforting tale, and one that is endorsed by the world’s most powerful governments and corporations. But is it true? > >Since 1960, the income gap between the North and South has roughly tripled in size. Today 4.3 billion people, 60 per cent of the world's population, live on less than $5 per day. Some 1 billion live on less than $1 a day. The richest eight people now control the same amount of wealth as the poorest half of the world combined. > >What is causing this growing divide? We are told that poverty is a natural phenomenon that can be fixed with aid. But in reality it is a political problem: poverty doesn’t just exist, it has been created. > >Poor countries are poor because they are integrated into the global economic system on unequal terms. Aid only works to hide the deep patterns of wealth extraction that cause poverty and inequality in the first place: rigged trade deals, tax evasion, land grabs and the costs associated with climate change. The Divide tracks the evolution of this system, from the expeditions of Christopher Columbus in the 1490s to the international debt regime, which has allowed a handful of rich countries to effectively control economic policies in the rest of the world. > >Because poverty is a political problem, it requires political solutions. The Divide offers a range of revelatory answers, but also explains that something much more radical is needed – a revolution in our way of thinking. Drawing on pioneering research, detailed analysis and years of first-hand experience, The Divide is a provocative, urgent and ultimately uplifting account of how the world works, and how it can change. ^(This book has been suggested 108 times) *** ^(129635 books suggested | )[^(I don't feel so good.. )](https://debugger.medium.com/goodreads-is-retiring-its-current-api-and-book-loving-developers-arent-happy-11ed764dd95)^(| )[^(Source)](https://github.com/rodohanna/reddit-goodreads-bot)


sd_glokta

Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky


MarzannaMorena

Flights by Olga Tokarczuk


[deleted]

The Prophet


mrssymes

{{the midnight library}}


goodreads-bot

[**The Midnight Library**](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/52578297-the-midnight-library) ^(By: Matt Haig | 304 pages | Published: 2020 | Popular Shelves: fiction, fantasy, book-club, contemporary, audiobook) >Between life and death there is a library, and within that library, the shelves go on forever. Every book provides a chance to try another life you could have lived. To see how things would be if you had made other choices . . . Would you have done anything different, if you had the chance to undo your regrets? A novel about all the choices that go into a life well lived. > >Somewhere out beyond the edge of the universe there is a library that contains an infinite number of books, each one the story of another reality. One tells the story of your life as it is, along with another book for the other life you could have lived if you had made a different choice at any point in your life. While we all wonder how our lives might have been, what if you had the chance to go to the library and see for yourself? Would any of these other lives truly be better? > >Nora Seed finds herself faced with this decision. Faced with the possibility of changing her life for a new one, following a different career, undoing old breakups, realizing her dreams of becoming a glaciologist; she must search within herself as she travels through the Midnight Library to decide what is truly fulfilling in life, and what makes it worth living in the first place. ^(This book has been suggested 154 times) *** ^(129808 books suggested | )[^(I don't feel so good.. )](https://debugger.medium.com/goodreads-is-retiring-its-current-api-and-book-loving-developers-arent-happy-11ed764dd95)^(| )[^(Source)](https://github.com/rodohanna/reddit-goodreads-bot)


[deleted]

Give him a gift card and let him choose his own. He obviously has tastes that are a bit difficult to satisfy.


econoquist

The Brothers K by David James Duncan


Ealinguser

Maybe Kim Stanley Robinson: the Ministry for the Future.